WordPress Translation now easy with livetranslation.com

WordPress (WP) has evolved a long way from the journalist-loving blogging platform it once was to becoming a powerful CMS of choice for many SME’s. What it lacks in out-of-the-box functionality is compensated for with the vast selection of user-contributed plugins, which evolve practically at the pace of the web itself.

Matt Mullenweg (all hail) & the team beautifully balance the division between core functionality and community contributed functional extension, making it elegantly simple to learn. Making a platform so usable means that marketers can use it in as much anger as the journo’ types.

One functionality omission is multilingual & locale support, whereby you have two options:

Deploy & maintain various instances of WordPress (one for each language & locale) – this is not a complex as it might sound, but does require more work than to:

Use a plugin such as qTranslate

qTranslate was developed by the contributor Qian Qin, who lives in Berlin. Thanks Qian! In true spirit, he’s done a fantastic job of making the plugin easy & simple to use. He actively maintains it & checks for compatibility issues with other plugins & WordPress updates.

Once qTranslate is configured, you have a powerful multilingual CMS at your fingertips. However, WordPress needs freshly ‘Pressed’ multilingual content, so if you don’t have a professional translator at hand and want professional content, then you can use the in-plugin services to buy professional translation without ever leaving WordPress! qTranslate has been integrated to work with the professional translation service: Translate English to French, Spanish, German and Portuguese – all of these languages, and more, can be quoted on, bought and paid for from within the plugin. Cool I hear you say! Okay… that’s enough plugging the plugin (sorry if that pun made you cringe!)

The translation process is oh-so-simple…

qTranslate sends the text (including any tags) to the server

It then gets automatically allocated to an experienced professional linguist who is notified to log in & provide the translation

The translator takes a few hours (depending on length) to undertake the translation, then checks through their translation before submitting it to the website for validation (which checks the integrity of the tags)

The translation is automatically pushed into the correct part of qTranslate

If the post is already published the translation will immediately ‘go live’

There’s no need to verify the integrity of the HTML tags, or to copy & paste the translations in – Live Translation will return the translated text directly to WordPress, so it will automatically appear online, as if like multilingual magic. – Did you just fall off your chair in amazement?!

Think of it as 3-click-translation. Well, actually its 4 to go back from your PayPal confirmation page to WP, but you get the idea. Ok, easy on the salivation, go download the plugin

– just enable the languages you want, go to ‘Edit post’ & click the text next to the flag for each language on the right hand side.